Rehearsing Scripture: Discovering God’s Word in Community

New
Paperback
2018
$22.34

Like a play, Scripture is a text that needs to be rehearsed, says Anna Carter Florence. We can study it carefully. We can listen to sermons and read up on experts. But in the end, Scripture is meant to be encountered-and we do this work best when we do it in community.

In this book Florence offers concrete practical tools for reading and encountering Scripture in groups. She shows how rehears-ing the text together enables us to find our script, or place, in Scripture and better apprehend biblical truth for our lives. Her reading strategies are fresh, easy to grasp, and very adaptable to a variety of contexts.

Suitable for new and seasoned Bible readers alike, Florence's Rehearsing Scripture invites groups and churches to move beyond doctrinal differences as they gather around a shared text and encounter God anew together.

Synopsis

Like a play, Scripture is a text that needs to be rehearsed, says Anna Carter Florence. We can study it carefully. We can listen to sermons and read up on experts. But in the end, Scripture is meant to be encountered-and we do this work best when we do it in community.

In this book Florence offers concrete practical tools for reading and encountering Scripture in groups. She shows how rehears-ing the text together enables us to find our script, or place, in Scripture and better apprehend biblical truth for our lives. Her reading strategies are fresh, easy to grasp, and very adaptable to a variety of contexts.

Suitable for new and seasoned Bible readers alike, Florence's Rehearsing Scripture invites groups and churches to move beyond doctrinal differences as they gather around a shared text and encounter God anew together.

$22.34

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Publisher: Eerdmans
Published: 30 Aug 2018
ISBN 10: 0802874126
ISBN 13: 9780802874122

Media Reviews

Nadia Bolz-Weber
-- author of Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People
This book is a gorgeous invitation to experience the Bible as a living thing. Anna Carter Florence nudges the reader, saying 'Can you feel the breath of it on your skin? Can you see how it moves? Can you hear what it's saying in your own ear? Can you taste both the bitter and the sweet?' She knows that if we do this, Scripture will always, always hand over the goods. I'm so grateful for her work, her love of the Bible, and her insistence that in it we find truth.

Walter Brueggemann
-- author of Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks
Anna Carter Florence issues a cunning, compelling invitation to her readers, namely, to recover the reading of Scripture as a communal, oral, contextual, dramatic enterprise--as though in a theater. This book is a rich resource for church folk (clergy and laity) who clamor for 'more Bible' but do not know how to get it. This is how to do it!

Samuel Wells
-- author of Incarnational Ministry and Learning to Dream Again
In this book Anna Carter Florence goes on a wild rumpus invigorating God's people to be a repertory church searching for something true. Treating Scripture as a fridge full of promise rather than a ready-made meal waiting to be microwaved, she provides a recipe to enliven Scripture reading and performance in our lives. Her Rehearsing Scripture will renew your practice and awaken your imagination.

Justo L. Gonz lez
-- author of A Brief History of Sunday: From the New Testament to the New Creation
A fascinating and fruitful guide for reading and living out Scripture. If you believe that the Bible has something important to say but find that Bible studies are often tedious, repetitive, or confrontational, this book is for you. If you wish to hear the Bible anew, this book is for you. If you are part of a Bible study group that seems to have lost its original energy, this book is for you.

William H. Willimon
-- author of Who Lynched Willie Earle? Preaching to Confront Racism
Into this lively book Anna Carter Florence pours her experience as an outstanding preacher and teacher of preachers. Scripture is known in its performance. The test of my preaching is in its enactment in the lives of my congregation. Florence's love of and deep engagement with Scripture are infectious. Fresh insights are found here on every page.

Thomas G. Long
-- author of The Witness of Preaching and What Shall We Say? Evil, Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith
For any preachers who have glided blithely through a biblical text on the way to writing a sermon, Anna Carter Florence calls us to repent and to pay close attention to the text again. Under her guidance the biblical passage is transformed from a sermon pretext into a rich drama bursting with power. Verbs, flattened by hasty and inattentive readings, now loom as mountains of meaning, and characters, once hardly noticed stick figures, become animated, articulate, and forceful. As a result, preachers do not 'preach themselves.' Instead they point a trembling finger at the text, saying 'I can't wait to tell you what's happening in there!'

Author Bio

Anna Carter Florence is the Peter Marshall Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary and an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Her other books include Preaching as Testimony.